Bangladeshi Member of Parliament (MP) Moinuddin Khan Badal lashed out at the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi governments on Thursday for failing to resolve even a single dispute in the Indian subcontinent over the years.
Urging South Asians to promote people-to-people contact through Track-II diplomacy, the Bangladeshi parliamentarian flayed the governments in New Delhi, Islamabad and Dhaka for failing to bridge the differences between the people of South Asia who, Badal said, share a historical, cultural, ecological and geographical heritage.
“We have concluded that the more the people of the Subcontinent interact [with each other], they will find their own solutions,” the visiting Bangladeshi lawmaker told journalists at the Karachi Press Club.
Referring to lingering territorial and water disputes between the three neighbours, he said the governments in the three countries are yet to seek an amicable solution to the longstanding issue of Kashmir or the disputes pertaining to the Indo-Bangladesh border and the Indo-Pakistan water reserves.
Terming the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) “a rich man’s club”, Khan said the only solution to promote mutual harmony among the three states is Track-II diplomacy.
The Bengali lawmaker urged the governments in the three countries to allow journalists, doctors, intellectuals and social activists to move across the borders to work as ambassadors of peace.
“Terrorists do not care about or need a visa to move across the borders. It is the common people who want visas, so allow them,” Khan said.
He urged journalists to use their pens, which he said were mightier than weapons, to make the governments in the Subcontinent develop cordial relations.
He lamented the fact that while the people of Europe, Africa and South America have formed their unions, the South Asians had failed to progress on this front.
“South Asians cannot come up with a South Asian union. It is a shame! I would ask the governments that there should be a concrete resolution to this issue.”
To a question regarding his country’s trial of those accused for the “Dhaka debacle”, the lawmaker clarified that only those who had committed crimes against humanity are being prosecuted.
“We are conducting a trial against those who had issued orders to or had themselves looted, raped or killed,” Khan said.
The Bengali legislator said despite having lost his family members in the 1971 war with the Pakistan Army, he bears “no malice against the great people of Pakistan”.
Khan replied in the negative when asked if fundamentalism is rising in his country, saying there is a secular democratic government in Bangladesh where all state institutions, including the army, know their constitutional limits.
He stressed the need for a “common curriculum” as a remedy to the promotion of religious extremism in madrassas.